Allan and the Sundered Veil
by Marco Incognito
Summary: Since I did a rewrite of Volume One, why not the story that accompanied it. This is Allan and the Sundered Veil rewritten to fit as best as possible into the original stories and also into the fan fiction universe I wish to create tying into the series, by Alan Moore and Kevin O' Neil. All credit goes to them.
1. The Dead Man

**Chapter One: The Dead Man**  
With thin, milk light from a shaved quarter moon at play on the map-parchment of his face, the dead man made his way among the dark topiary, overgrown and monstrous, in those abandoned ornamental gardens sprawled out among the castle ruins. Turrets fallen to a scree of brick and warped spines of collapsing battlement lay abject and senescent in the lunar sickle's cool, diluted silvering, so that even the dead man caught his breath: He had not though the place to be so changed since his demise. Black, spiteful grass thrust up between the terrace's cracked flags and from the centre of a drained and reeking fountain gazed a granite faun, horned brow streaked white by pigeon droppings and the mouth, open in song, crammed full with creeper.

Wuthering Zephyrs combed the dead man's iron grey locks and set his long tan coat to flap like sailcloth, lifting from it dusts and faded perfumes of the serengeti, up into the morbid English damp hung on the garden air. Looking into the statue's blind and bird soiled eyes it seemed to him he saw himself reflected; that same bold young pagan vision of a glorious wilderness, betrayed, like him, by age. Betrayed by time.

So lost were his dead thoughts to rue and reverie, he did not hear the huge, worm-peppered oak that was the castle's terrace door swing open at his back. Save for a dull, faint tingle in the thin machete scar that ran across his neck there at the rear, below the hairline, he received no intimation that he was observed until the woman spoke behind him in low, soft-accented tones that whirled the dead man round to face her, wild and startled.

"Lady Ragnall is expecting you. Her Ladyship will be pleased to receive you in the library. Follow me, please."  
The speaker was a striking negress, some few inches taller than the dead man was himself, clad in a long skirt of what looked like emerald velvet and hung all about with bracelets, beads and gaudy fetishes, a flickering candelabra held up in one slender hand. Her hair was hidden by the turquoise wrapping of a turban, and before she turned from him to walk away down the decaying castle's silent hall he glimpsed the spiraling raised bumps of ritual disfigurements upon her cheeks, yet could not match the scarring's singular design with those of any similarly-decroated trie he had encountered while in Africa. It seemed that he had no choice but to follow where she led, down corridors that twisted like intestines, winding ever deeper into the decaying mass of this once-stately building, now a bleak and ghostly carcass.

Walking briskly so that he might match the servant woman's stride the sea man marveled at the shifting tableau of fantastic despoliation that her candle-halo brought to light about them. Here, garnet-eyed rats nested in the rubble of a great crashed chandelier that all but blocked the passage way before them both. Here, long- obliterated portraits were hung side by side among the rooting bats.

How had the opulent Ragnall estates become reduced to this? More troubling still, how could it be that his dear former friend and patron Lady Ragnall yet resided here, in chambers breached by rain; upon magnificent Axminster carpets annexed long since by the creep of moss and slug and fungus? When first he had glimpsed the moonlit relic of the castle he had known a pang of grief, believing that his wise and learned dowager companion must have passed on without issue, leaving her ancestral home and grounds to slide into the great and final disrepair of unreined nature. Grief was now replaced by an insidious and clinging apprehension as he followed the aloof and silent blackamoor between the rotting hanging tapestries beneath a frescoed ceiling that would suddenly gape open on a patch of glinting and indifferent stars.

At last the ebon beauty paused before a portal of smoke-damaged cedar that the dead man recognized as having been the entrance to the castle library, though now adorned by great and leaping dog-tongues of black soot, the remnants of some earlier catastrophe. Placing one hand upon the door's brass lion-head knob, now streaked with verdigris, the servant woman turned her cool and level stare once more upon the dead man at her heel. Limned by the yellow, stuttering radiance of the candelabra that she held aloft, her high boned face could now be seen more clearly, with the raised dots of her ritual scars uncoiling like two serpents from her cheeks and rearing up along her temples to curl inward at the shaved and hairless brownie, meeting at a point between her green and ocean-cryptic eyes. Her alien glamour and her self possession breathed upon the long spent ashes of self-possession breathed upon the long-spent ashes of the dead man's passion, nursing embers back to life amongst cold cinders he had thought long since extinguished. If perhaps he were a younger man and bore the marks of fewer wounds upon his body and his heart...? He grimaced and suppressed a rueful laugh. Perhaps if he were still alive? The bruised and luscious fruits that were her lips moved almost not at all as she pushed wide the ruined library door, and spoke her first words since she had encountered him upon the weed-cracked terrace.

"Lady Ragnall waits on you within."

Dazed by the strangeness of his circumstances, he stepped past her and into the high-roofed room beyond, where for a moment he was dazzled by what seemed a thousand scintilla of light on every side, resolving as his eyes became accustomed to the glitter into dozen upon dozens of wax candles, fabulous grotesques of spilling tallow set at random on the many mantles, shelves and surfaces contained within the library. There at the center of this glittering firmament, couched deep within the threadbare covers of a great bed made from two divans pushed one against the other was the gaunt and altered form of Lady Ragnall, quite unrecognizable save for the dancing animation in her clever eyes, sunk low within the wrinkled darkness of their sockets. Glancing up, their quick, voracious gaze settled upon the dead man. Parched lips creasing into a painted smile, at last she spoke, voice then and cracked yet somehow poignant, like a broken harpsichord.

"Dear Mr. Quatermain. How good of you to come. I've been expecting you, though all good sense informed me I should not."  
Her smile here seemed to broaden, taking on a somewhat sly and knowing cast before she spoke again.

"They said that you were dead. I had a letter fro mSir Henry's brother, George, to that effect. Apparently you died at dawn three years ago in 1886, from injuries bravely received, away in some darker-than-usual corner of the darkest continent. I must say you look very well considering."

The legendary hunter and adventurer shuffled uncomfortably and seemed to duck his head within the collar of his long and trailing coat. There was the faintest shadow of a wince accompanying his reply.

"I'd had enough. Surely you know me well enough to understand that? All of the fighting. All the glories and triumphs of youth, it all became too loud for me somehow. Too rowdy and too wearying to someone of my years, but what was I do? A world enthused by 's somewhat overblown and generous accounts of my adventures would not suffer me to rest; would never tolerate the thought of Allan Quartermain, now grey and doddering, pruning the roses in some leaden suburb. No, I gave them what they wanted: a heroic death and an untended grave in some unreachably far corner of the world. Having provided my admirers with a suitable conclusion, i am free to live my afterlife, whatever span I have remaining, as my own."

Here Lady Ragnall levered herself up laboriously until she was propped up by one elbow in her nest of coverlet and pillow. Narrowing her eyes, head titled in a bird-like manner to one side she scrutinized him shrewdly.

"It was all a yarn, then? All that business that George Curtis mentioned in the letter that he sent, concerning a lost kingdom called Zu-Vendis? Why, he told me that Sir Henry Curtis was now King there and would be no more returning to these isles. He said that you were slain and so too was the Zulu friend you spoke of once. Umslopogaas, was that his name? As George reported things, your warrior companion fell heroically in battle against plotters who might otherwise have robbed Sir Henry of his life. Was this all smoke and mirrors to accompany your vanishing act, ?"

Allan sighed heacily and sat himself on the broad arm of the divan there at the foot of Lady Ragnall's makeshift bed.

"Would that it were. I saw Umslopogaas myself as he was slain, hurling his enemy Lord Nasta from a parapet before he raised his bloody axe, Inkosikaas, up to his lips and kissed it, crying out "I died, I die, but 'twas a kingly fray." No, that was real enough, as was ZuVendis and my friend Sir Henry's marriage to its Queen, Nyleptha. Only my demise was sham, a ruse to grant me freedom from my suffocating reputation."

Lady Ragnall looked away from Allan and stared thoughtfully towards the far recesses of the candle-shadowed library, where the explorer noticed that her nubian maidservant was at work building a fire within the room's sole marble hearth. With some surprise he realized that the girl was tearing pages from the folio editions ranked upon the library's many shelves to feed the fledging blaze. The dowager's chapped voice dragged his attention back to where her frail form nestled in its improvised, untidy cot.

"And yet you come back here. And why was that, I wonder?" Her ancient, knowing eyes were rested now on Quatermain once more, and as he met her gaze he understood that she already knew the answer to her question; would not be deceive by tales of him having returned out of concern for her welfare. His reply was brief and truthful.

"The taduki. I returned for the taduki.

Lady Ragnall smiled. Taduki, strangest of narcotics, to which she alone had access. With taduki, one might rend the veil of Time and be immersed in former lives, as Allan's own adventure with the Ivory boy would readily attest. With taduki, one might easily escape ones present self and circumstances.

"Ah, taduki. the drug owns us, doesn't it? Addicted to the taste of previous lives we let our current ones of hang. I let my castle fall to ruin while taduki leads me down the byways of eternity. Marisa here prepares it for me, all my other servants fled."

Here Lady Ragnall singled to the negro woman, who at once began to gather an array of curious paraphernalia from the library's far corner, setting it upon a low, carved table near the weathered armchair by the bed. Allan could see a pipe, a brazier, some powdered leaves.

The saving girl Marisa patiently lit charcoal in the brazier. Looking meaningfully into Allan's eyes, she handed him the pipe. Propped on her pillows, Lady Ragnall watched with vicarious anticipation as the great explorer held the bowl to catch the brazier's fumes, his lips pursing around the nine's elaborately decorated stem.

Marisa dropped a pinch of powdered leaves onto the brazier and as the vapor hissed up, Quatermain inhaled. The instantly familiar scent coiled tendrils deep within his skull, and even as he felt his present personality beginning to dissolve before the drug's insistent tides he knew that there was something wrong.  
The library fell away and he was topping through a hideous alien abyss where cascaded foreign stars and dreadful gods howled from the Universe's rim. As gibbering blackness swallowed him, the dead man understood that this time the taduki offered not another life. This time it offered him naught but second death, much less heroic than his first, but much more final. far off, as in another world, he heard the black maidservant start to scream.

Then there was nothing save devouring light.


	2. In the Ruins of Time

**Chapter 2: In the Ruins of Time**  
Within the mildewed, umber husk of Lady Ragnall's library, lyrically illuminated by the sonnets blazing in the hearth, an intricately carved taduki pipe fell from the nerveless fingers of the great, reputedly deceased Allan Quatermain. Crouched at his side and tending to the brazier upon which the crumpled leaves of the taduki had been vaporized, the Nubian servant gave vent to a sudden piecing scream.

"Marisa? My dear girl, whatever is the matter?"

Lady Ragnall, frail as some exhumed Egyptian queen, sat up as far as she was able in her makeshift bed, formed by two hulking, worn divans pushed up against each other in the firelit library's centre/ Her wet eyes fixed in an anxious, questioning look upon the servant woman who was kneeling now beside the sprawled, convulsing body of the old mannequin that writhed before, knuckles pressed against her tropic lips, face paling visibly so that the ritual whorls of beautiful disfigurement raised on her soft obsidian cheeks stood out in dark relief. Across the palsied shadows of the of the chamber floor, the thin mash-heron voice of Lady Ragnall came again, more urgently.

"Tell me what's wrong! Is alive or dead?"

Marisa could not speak. Trained as a priestess of the sacred drug taduki in the furthest eastern reaches of the Congo before coming here to assist in the dowager's experiments with the divine narcotic, she had taken on the drug's mysterious visions as a form of second sight, and did not always see things quite as others did. Now, as Marisa's disbelieving gaze took in the spectacle of the weathered explorer twitching on the parquet flooring, she beheld a spectacle that neither she or any priestess in her long tradition had heard tell of, much less witnessed.

Quatermain was inside out. At least, that was the first impression that Marisa gained on glimpsing the profusion of exposed internal organs; the exploded bones of an exterior skeleton. And yet, the more she watched the slaughterhouse grotesque that shuddered on the wooden tiles in front of her, the more she was not sure. it seemed to her bewildered sight as if something more subtle and peculiar were occurring.

For one thing, it appeared as if the man still had flesh on the outside, but altered somehow, made transparent to reveal the inner body...and yet that too was not the entire truth of things, Marisa realized as she watched in frightened fascination. It wasn't simply that one could see through the body's outer layers. It was that one could see around the, to the viscera inside, as from some unimaginable vantage point that looked on things inside and out and saw both vistas simultaneously. Quatermain's face was visible, stunned terror frozen deep into its features, and yet somehow these were lifted out from the main mass of the explorer's head, like an expanded section in a diagram. Peering around these hanging jigsaw fragments, one could see the marble whiteness of the skull, itself somehow cross sectioned to expose the brain, unfolded through an alien plane of space revealing naked cortex, neural marrow at its centre. Every inch of the adventurer's wracked body, both inside and out, was visible to the appalled Marisa in its intimate and hideous finery.

Worse still, if the man's limbs moved in any way, a more terrible phenomenon became apparent: every gesture left there in the air behind itself a stream of solid-seemingly after images, so that the movement of one horribly translucent arm would yield, like pinions from some phantom swan; some form out of an alien geometry.

The non-Euclidean shape ripple before her in such violent contravention of the normal laws governing space and reason that Marisa felt a heavy wave of nausea welling within her. Closing tight her eyes, she willed her vision to return to normal, free from the grotesque perspectives her taduki-trained perceptions had so suddenly afforded her. When she opened them again, Quatermain's body had become once more a reassuring, opaque solid. Ominously still, he sprawled upon the library's chill parquet in a death like trance. As if from far away, Marisa heard the agitated

"Speak, confound you! What is wrong with ?"

Marisa looked up at her mistress in confusion, jade eyes dazed and blinking like one led from darkness into light, or woken from some mystifying dream.

"Forgive me, Mistress," the maidservant stammered. "I have been pierced by a vision, strange and terrible. It seems to me as if your friend has not been taken by the drug into a previous life, as has transpired before, but rather torn from past and present altogether, taken to a wasteland that is quite beyond al time, or space, or anything we know."

Here Marisa fell silent, her eyes downcast. It was quite the longest speech that Lady Ragnall had, in all their years together, heard the ebon beauty utter. Cocking her frail, bird-like skull to one side as she paused, considering, the dowager at last pursed her thin lips decisively and offered up her verdict on this new and worrying turn of events.

"Then fetch pillows and blankets so that we at least can make his body comfortable. If 's soul has been taken from us, then we must do all we can to bring it back."

Without replying, Marisa stood up and hurried from the flickering library to do as she'd been bidden. In the chamber now was no sound save the reedy, rattling wheeze of the decayed aristocrat herself, still sat bolt upright in a stale and yellowed froth of bedsheets; that, and the much fainter breathing of the man sprawled all but lifeless on the floor. Oh, my dear , thought Lady Ragnall. What dark continent are you exploring now?

Quatermain had felt the consciousness torn from his body, gripped by the drug's phantasmal diamond fist. He's heard Marisa scream and then awareness was dashed from him by a cold, obliterating light. Now he was lost. As sensibility returned, he found himself afloat, a ghostly form amidst a shimmering violet limbo. What had happened? This was not a breathtaking immersion in past incarnation that the drug had hitherto provided. All about him dreamlike forms congealed from viscous twilight, half-materialized before once more dissolving into opalescent nothing. Smoldering ferns and mollusk spirals, scintillating on the brink of substance.

Scarcely has Quatermain formed the conscious wish for some navigational geography by which to find his way, than suddenly the ectoplasmic medium about him seemed to quiver, crystallizing and condensing into landscape. There below his wraith-like feet, lush tufts of pale mauve grass grew from mud of rich indigo. A queasy hybrid vegetation, writing blossoms neither wholly cuttlefish nor thistle, sprouted from the spectral verges. These surely were marshlands of mind, a terrible Sargasso of the psyche where souls foundered in an astral mire. somewhere ahead of him were voices, murmuring, and meagre firelight glistering in the starless gloom.

Advancing, the explorer beheld two incongruous figures, hunched over a dim and heatless fire whereon burned the unpleasant squid flowers, tentacles curling upon themselves, withering in the queer green flames. To one side of this cheerless blaze there sat a stooped young man, lugubrious features weirdly underlie by the wan radiance of the campfire. Cross-legged on the mauve turf opposite this dreamy individual sat a person stranger yet, a strongly built man decked out in the dusty grey appeared of a Southern Officer of the American War between the States. Both men glanced up suspiciously at Quatermain's approach.

"I mean no harm," the adventurer said in haste, noting that the Confederate captain's hand moved cautiously towards the saber hanging at his side. "My name is Allan Quatermain, and I fear I am lost. Tell me, where are we and how came you here? Are we alive, or dead and in some purgatory unpredicted by religion?" Here a meaningful glance passed between the seated figures before the stooped, younger man made a reply, his voice and manner mild and academic.

I am Randolph Carter. This is my great-uncle John. I fear we are as lost as you appear to be." The young man went on to describe an improbable New England of the twentieth century, a life spent in reclusive exploration of the world of dreams. During one such excursion through what the young man referred to as "the gates of Deeper Slumber," he had stayed unwittingly into these current psychic wastelands, previously unknown to him. Here he had met the shade or astral double of his distant relative, a man mysteriously lost in battle a century before. At this point the Civil War veteran took up the tale, his low commanding voice almost a whisper.

" I don't know about this twentieth century Randoplh talks about. All I know is that I was dying in a cave and staring at the planet Mars just hanging there above me in the grey dawn sky, its strong unblinking light amidst the fading stars. Suddenly, I'm wrenched from my body, just as as if the pull of Mars is drawing up my soul towards it...but instead I end up in this dismal, gaseous place, where I run into Randolph, who tells me that he is my great nephew from Providence, Rhode Island. Next thing, you turn up from nowhere."

"Not exactly nowhere,"Quatermain responded, "I'm from England in the last half of the nineteenth century. It seems I've been propelled here by a drug I ingested. Normally it causes vision of time past, but in this instance it would seem to have removed me from time altogether. What is more, in my experience as a hunter, I'm not sure that this locale is an entirely friendly one."

He gestured toward the gloom beyond the greenish halo of their fire. Something of bulk dragged itself through the furthest weeds. Elsewhere, a faint, dry sound like rattling lobster claws.

A nervous perspiration dewed the young man's brow, and panic cracked his high pitched voice. "It sounds like we're surrounded. What are we to do? I'm hardly what you'd call a fighting man."

The soldier favored his great nephew with a scornful look. " Seems the spunk has gone out of the Carter clan since my day. You'd best let me handle this." There was a satisfying hiss of steel as the Confederate captain drew his sword. Not one to shrink from combat, Quatermain lifted a blazing branch of the anemone-tipped bracken from the fire, arcing it through the darkness.

The swathe of emerald flame briefly illuminated something very like a monstrous centipede made of translucent gelatine, a frogspawn cluster of a dozen eyes grouped at one end that glittered momentarily in the ghastly viridian light. Worse shapes shifted suggestively in the encroaching murk. Quatermain's voice was low and grim.

"There's dozens of the things. I somehow don't think sticks and swords will rescue us from this. We have to..." Quatermain broke off in mid speech. Something strange was happening in the gloom before them. A faint luminescent pulse disturbed the stygian blackness, growing stronger and more regular with every moment.

The explorer gasped in disbelief as the peculiar throb of light resolved itself into a ghostly figure, seated in mid-air upon the saddle of a dazzling contraption made from brass, the man's garb not dissimilar to that of Quatermain's own era. The bright light around this new arrival and his craft seemed to alarm the squirming presences beyond the firelight's rim, prompting them with withdraw. At this, the stranger called out to the three men.

"Climb aboard. The novelty of my arrival won't deter these horrors long." Pausing, he thought to introduce himself.

"My name is Dr. Moses Nebogipfel"

he paused as if embarrassed at his own name.

"I'm sometimes called the Time Traveller"


	3. In the Shadow of the Sphinx

**Chapter 3: In the Shadow of the Sphinx**  
Their knuckles blanched and tight upon the frigid brass rails of the open sphere that carried them, the four men tumbled through the smears and color and half-realized forms that edged the canvas of Eternity. Outside the regimented centuries, they rode their glimmering and peculiar brazen craft down the etheric, surging waterfall of time itself amidst the dull boom of the pouring aeons, blinded in the spindrift spray of instants. Allan Quatermain...or at least, his astral semblance...clung to the posterior framework of their hurtling time-boat while the rushing storm-breath of cascading ages slapped and stung against his leathered cheek. He struggled to convince himself that this was all some lunatic phantasm conjured by the occult drug _taduki_ he'd ingested at the crumbling country seat of Lady Ragnall where his mortal form still lay in a convulsive coma, but he strived in vain. The rushing chrono-chasm and the curious chariot upon which he and his companions shot the rapids of the hours were too immediate and real to be dismissed as mere hallucination. The acclaimed explorer knew within his very soul that were he for an instant to release his grip on the cold tubing of their vessel's rim thence would fall forever, lost and screaming in Infinity. No, this was neither lotus-vision nor mirage. Quatermain hugged the rail and swore beneath his breath.

To Allan's right, clamped white and gasping to the Time-ship's starboard filigree was the dream-body of the young New Englander who claimed to be an astral voyager named Randolph Carter, drawn here from the future reaches of the twentieth century. Clasping their vehicle's intricate pipework opposite the pale and shivering young man, to Allan's left, was the more masculine and sturdy figure of another ectoplasmic traveler, this one originating in the recent past from times not long after America's bloody and tragic Civil War. By some fluke of the time stream it transpired that this grim, battle-weary figure in his flapping coat of dull Confederate grey was a relation, or, more, accurately, ancestor to the timid Rhode island student, being Randolph Carter's lost great uncle John.

Quatermain had encountered the two men while wandering in the shifting psychic landscape to which the _taduki_ had transported him, not long before they were attacked by loathsome alien horrors that seemed native to that twilight realm. Only the intervention of the enigmatic individual whose epoch-spanning engine now transported them had saved the three dream castaways from a near unimaginable fate. Quatermain now turned his attention to this last of his co-passengers, who sat astride a saddle at the centre of the skeletal brass shape, expertly readjusting dials and levers sprouted from the chill bronze of his marvelous machine's control assembly. "The Time Traveller" he'd call himself, and judging by his dress he seemed to have his origins not far from Quatermain's own period, which was to say the last half of the nineteenth century.

"Hold on," their dapper helmsman shouted now, above the howl of the bilennia. "We're almost there!"

The incoherent, glittering continuum that seemed to spiral and rotate about them now appeared to slow, resolving into landscape. Eerie wilderness, though not without a haunted beauty, stretched on every side beneath a canopy of strangely altered constellations, as at last the brass-bound ship came to a halt. Quatermain and the other men stepped down unsteadily onto fine-powdered bonemeal sands that had, at least the satisfying semblance of solidity.

Rising from the bleached and calceous floor not far from where their craft had come to rest, a towering and flawless statue of pure alabaster too in sharp relief against the plush, star sequined velvet of the night. Supine on its massive plinth the white Sphinx sprawled, its weighty feline forepaws resting one atop the other and its smoothly chiseled woman's lips creased faintly in a knowing, almost melancholy smile. It was towards this pristine, overpowering icon of enigma that the strange Time-mariner now strode, bidding his new companions follow in his wake.

Dismissing protests and inquiries from both Quatermain and the two Carters with a brisk shake of his head, the traveler took from his waistcoat pocket a remarkable key-like device made of blue crystal. Pointing this towards the statue's seamless, soaring base appeared to trigger some response within the monolith itself. A large trapezohedral section of the plinth slowly unfolded from the central mass and lifted with the softest purr of mechanism to reveal the entrance of a softly-lit interior concealed within the pallid marble block.

Entering this unexpected hidden room and bidding his three fellows follow him inside, their new friend made once more a gesture with his sapphire key at which the open segment of the sheer white stone descended once more to its previous position, with the trio sealed inside a gold-illuminated chamber, sparsely furnished in an odd quasi-Egyptian style and empty save for reassuringly untidy piles of books, and their and other personal effects presumably belonging to their host.

Seating himself in a hieroglyphic-crowded alcove, Allan noticed a glass oval set into the wall directly opposite his vantage point. As if the framed shape were some magic mirror, images swam lazily across its egg-shaped surface that, after some moments, the explorer recognized as a slowly rotating view of the queer wilderness immediately beyond their chamber. As he watched, the Time-machine itself crawled into view, stood motionless in the skull colored, starlit wastes. Allan supposed the purpose of this fascinating crystal screen was to allow the Sphinx's occupants to monitor the realm outside, but scarcely had he formed this thought than his attention was called to the traveller who'd brought them here, now standing in the middle of the gently glowing chamber in a posture of this fascinating crystal screen was to allow the Sphinx's occupants to monitor the realm outside, but scarcely had he formed this thought than his attention was called to the traveller who'd brought them here, now standing in the middle of the gently glowing chamber in a posture of address as he surveyed his guests.

"You're wondering, no doubt, whom I might be and, further to this, why I have delivered you this appalling place."

Their rescuer paused here, as if to gather up his thoughts, before continuing.

"My name is of no consequence. Suffice to say that I am an inventor, formerly residing here in London, who perfected in the last years of the nineteenth century a means of traveling in time. I had adventures in Earth's farthest future after which, following a brief farewell visit to my own day, I have dwelled here in the phantom stream of decades ever since as an explorer, much like your good self."

The traveler here nodded congenially to Quatermain, who frowned in puzzlement by what of a response, unable to contain his curiosity.

"Now wait a minute! Did you just say here in London?" Do you mean to tell us that the barren plain beyond these walls is...?" Quatermain trailed off, incredulously, as the traveler completed his inquiry for him, with a rueful smile.

"Is London? I'm afraid so, though it is the London of a period some thousands if not millions of years after the decline of the metropolis that you yourself are more familiar with. London and England both are gone, the names made meaningless by these unending chalky drifts. Only this cryptic Sphinx would seem to have endured the ages, changeless and impregnable. I came across it...or an earlier incarnation of it...during my first jaunt through time, and I have since remodeled it to my own purposes."

"And just what purposes would those be, friend"

It was the gruff Confederate who spoke, his shrewd and war-wise eyes unblinking as he weighed up their deliverer. The scientist have a curt nod, as if acknowledging the soldier's question and its obvious validity, before continuing.

"I am afraid my answer will yield little comfort. Briefly, in my explorations of the chronologic flow, I have discovered something something dreadfully amiss within the fields of human time. My sojourns in the stream of being have convinced me that our own material Universe, it's past, its present and its future, is but one plane of a splendorous and infinitely greater structure that comprises nothing less than the totality of all Existence, manifested in both physical and spiritual dimensions. You will guess my horror, then, when I discovered that there seems to be a vast, near unimaginable _hole_ torn in the fabric of Creation, and that certain atmospheres or entities are leaking through this dreadful and apocalyptic pit from _somewhere_ else!

Silencing a frightened exclamation of surprise from Randolph Carter, the Time-traveler continued.

"You yourselves encountered some of the more insignificant spawn of these vile, trans-existential beings shortly prior to my arrival on the astral plane to which your various adventures had transported you. Understand that I was actively seeking you there. All three of you are heroes, each in your own fashion, and I'm desperately in need of some assistance in my efforts to prevent further contamination of our Universe by these unfathomable alien grotesqueries."

Quatermain interrupted. "Would those be the things you speak of? he said, pointing to the oval screen.

In the glass eye of the monitor-device, the previously trackless hinterlands beyond the safety of the Sphinx were suddenly aswarm with an insidious life. Awful and shambling simian forms whose greatest horror was the faint humanity remaining in their slack albino faces shuffled through the dunes outside, uncomfortably near the undefended Time-machine. Gaze fixed upon the shimmering crystal of his watching-glass, their host's voice burned with stifled anger as he spoke.

"They're Morlocks, creatures similar to the Mi-Gou, or the abominable Snowmen. While they're not the entities that I referred to, they appeared to have been possessed by them. I had not expected to find them so far downriver in the flow of Time. If we'd prevent them wrecking my machine and thus stranding us here upon Eternity's bleak margins, we must be prepared to fight."

At this the timorous Rhode Island student gave a low moan of dismay, though his great-uncle seemed more cheered. The elder Carter drew his army-issue cutlass from its sheath and chuckled. "It's about time" was his sole remark. Producing from the chamber's further recesses a small selection of weighty mechanic's tools that might be used as weapons, the grim chrono-naut armed Quatermain, the younger Carter and himself before training his blue glass key upon the chamber door's interior.

"Be ready to rush out at them as soon as I raise up the door. If we can beat a path to my conveyance then I'll carry us from here towards a date less inhospitable."

At this the key pulsed once with faint sapphire light and the trapezohedron that gave entrance to the Sphinx's hollow base swung upwards soundlessly. Then everything happened at once.

Quatermain rushed out over the wan talcum sands, clouds of luminous dust at his heel. With the heavy industrial spanner his host had provided he swung his arm out in a great lethal arc that demolished one side of the blind, ape-like face looming suddenly in at him, out from the shadows. To one side he saw Randolph Carter fall screaming with one of the livid and shaggy monstrosities crouched on his back, but before he could leap to the youngster's assistance the Carter lad's great-uncle stepped from the darkness and took the brute's head off with one cutlass-swipe.

By now, the temporal argonaut had reached his precious machine, although not without blood, brains and ghastly white Morlock-fur clotting the carpenter's hammer that he so effectively swung. He was straddling his saddle and sparking the Time-vessel's engine to life as both Quatermain and Captain Carter helped Randolph into position upon the ship's framework. The starry desert sky above them seemed to swirl and turn as the machine began to lift them from their desperate situation.

It was then that Quatermain felt something crash against him from behind. As snowy simian arms wrapped tight about his throat he realized that the grub-pale horrors were aboard the Time-machine.


	4. The Abyss of the Lights

**Chapter IV: The Abyss of the Lights**

Quatermain knew that in reality his mortal body was elsewhere, back in the solid world and no doubt comatose upon the floor of Lady Ragnall's ruined, flame-lit library; victim to am overdose of the time-twisting drug aduki. The form he presently inhabited, though modeled to recall in every way the old explorer's fleshy shell down to the clothing that was draped about it, Allan knew to be some kind of astral construct shaped from dream-stuff, and presumably with no more substance than that of a moment's fancy. Even so, a dreadful apprehension deep within the arrow of his being told him that wherever he might be, whatever numinous state he may have ascended to, there were yet things here that might injure him. Indeed might even kill him.

One such creature, an albino and Neanderthal monstrosity that Quatermain's newfound companion the Time Traveller referred to as a Morlock, lunged now at the scarred adventurer with jaws agape, revealing what seemed to be nothing but protracted canines, dripping with a ragged lace of Milky of milky and opaque saliva, which gave way to a hideous flower of pink flesh from within.

Everything had happened so quickly. Exiled from normal consciousness by the taduki, Quatermain had found himself within an eerie, metamorphic landscape where he had encountered two more displaced souls, the timorous New England dreamer Randolph Carter and the dour Confederate officer who, it transpired, was Carter's long presumed dead Uncle John. Attacked by horrors native to those shifting twilight latitudes, they were reprieved by the arrival of the man who styled himself the Time Traveller, astride the brazen vessel upon which he braved the torrent of the aeons. First conveying them along the time stream to his base of operations in the huge plinth of an enigmatic carven sphinx, the Time Traveller had warned them of a dreadful flaw in space and time itself, a gaping hole torn in the very fabric of existence through which unimaginable horrors from beyond threatened to burst through into gross material existence. Scarcely had the Traveller completed his account before his sanctuary was entirely overrun by brutish servants of the trans-dimensional monstrosities, shambling and pallid ape-things that the traveller had called Mi-Go, or Morlocks. One of these had leapt aboard the brass-frame vessel of the Chrononaut just as it began to ferry the four men to safety, and now clawed frantically at Quatermain as it hung roaring from the Time-ship's rail with murder in its blind and cataracts eyes.

The creature's nest blow raked Quatermain's shoulder, and the sudden stringing wetness told him that his apprehensions were well founded. He was bleeding, though the blood, presumably, was not that of the body but a far more precious spiritual fluid that flowed through the human soul. There were, then, after all, things here with a capacity to harm him. Worse, it seemed that they might harm him upon levels and in ways that he had not imagined. Could one's spirit bleed to death? A true and final death, beyond all hope of resurrection? He had no time to dwell upon these metaphysical complexities before the screeching ape-thing launched itself at him once more.

The Time-ship lurched, unbalanced by the Morlock's weight, and clinging to the craft's far sides, both the Confederate captain and his frightened nephew yelled with anger and alarm respectively. Wrestling with the craft's controls, the temporal argonaut was shouting something, but above the howling of the time-winds and the bellowing of Quatermain's sub human-adversary, the explorer could not make sense of the helmsman's cry. The blind brute had a grip on Allan's coat, and inexorably pulled the struggling human closer to those awful, snapping teeth and the lotus shaped death. The single hand with which he gripped the vessel's brasswork slithered dangerously for several inches before Quatermain could check himself and take a firmer grip, and the explorer knew that he did not manage to reverse this situation quickly, he would be flung from the ship into the bottomless and surging chaos through which the craft hurled.

Remembering the huge mechanic's wrench that he still gripped in his free hand. Quatermain swung his arm in a relentless weighted arc that thudded gratifyingly against the white fur matted on the monster's cheekbone, which collapsed beneath the impact. Scrabbling against the rail for purchase, frantic in sightless agony, the Morlock had time for a solitary dog-like yowl of dreadful pain before the force of Allan's backswing slammed into its temple to release a gruel-like spray of brains.

Convulsing, clenching in its mortal spasms, the monstrosity gripped fast upon the pipe-work of the Timeship's frame even as its grotesque and stunted body began slowly and with an almost majestic air of inevitability to topple back towards the screaming void that shrieked about them. With a sense of helpless and despairing foresight, the explorer understood what was about to happen and attempted vainly to dislodge the creature's deathtrap on the railing with his wrench, knowing within himself that he was far too late.

The thin, brass pipe ruptured beneath the creature's morbid weight, finally burst at a collared joint with an ear-splitting screech and a great gout of what appeared to Quatermain to be prismatic steam, scintillant, almost sequined to the naked eye. Crouched over to his controls, the Traveller looked round to view the damage to his vessel, cooler draining from his face in fright as he set eyes upon the hissing rend within his Time-car's frame. Its thick, grey fingers finally torn from the damaged pipe by the vast suction of the vessel's slipstream, the dead Morlock was ripped with incredible ferocity into the vehicle's wake, amongst the ravelling plumes of shimmering steam or plasma streaming from the leak the lifeless beast had made.

To Allan's horror, as he watched the bleached corpse fall away from him, he saw that it was undergoing what could only be described as a repellent and unnatural blossoming. What seemed a thousand heads, four thousand limbs and countless fingers sprouted in a solid and organic after-trial behind the tumbling sub-man, so that it became an elongated, almost centipedal shape, twisting grotesquely in upon itself as it retreated to a livid speck in the seething and awful maelstrom of the centuries exploding at their back. It was almost as if every moment, every slice of the Morlock's trajectory were carved in space behind it as it spiralled away through the fourth dimension's awesome and eternal Now, that constant and unending hyper-moment in which all creation and the terrible and fathomless abyss of history were contained.

It was with difficulty that Quatermain wrestled his attention from the spectacle of the receding Morlock, but there were more urgent matters to attend to. The Time-craft seemed to be losing altitude. if there could be said to be such a thing as altitude in this bewildering domain. The queer and spectrumatic steam now twisted upwards from the mangled fitting, and a horrid tingling in the soles of Allan's feet told him that they were falling. Falling slowly, it would seem, as through some thick and viscous medium, but falling nonetheless. Now he could hear the panicked imprecations of the Traveller hunched at the Chronopede's controls above the whistling rush of their descent.

"I'm losing power. We're going down into the inert Time-soup that stagnates below the race of history's impulsive current. Best hang on to something tight. I've no idea how far we have to fall."

His forehead bright with nervous perspiration, the young student Randolph Carter from Rhode Island stole up here, voice high and quivering.

"I-isn't this time itself we're dropping through? How do you know that we won't fall forever?"

The Traveller's grim silence in response to this was all the answer any of the men required. They did as they were bidden and clung fast against the Time-Ship's broken ribs as it continued its unhurried, irreversible descent into the dark and nebula swirl of raw and random time below.

Though it was scarcely possible within such straits to take the measurement of passing moments, it did not seem long before the gruff voice of the elder Carter roused the others from their bleak, despairing torpor as they gazed into the depthless, hopeless wastes about them.

"I see something down below us. If these are time's backwaters, like our traveling friend informs us, then I reckon what I'm looking at must be some kind of swamp gas."

Narrowing his slate-flecked eyes, Quatermain peered into the yawning chasm under them them. Something approached. although he could not tell if this phenomenon were rising up towards them through the chronic mark, or if they in their turn were sinking towards it.

"He's right. I can see coloured lights, like Chinese lanterns, getting closer to us. What in god's name are they, man?

This last remark of Allan's was directed at the temporal voyage himself, who frowned and slowly shook his head as the strange luminosities tracked ever nearer.

"I don't know. This is a phenomenon that I've not previously encountered. Why, the shape looks almost geometric. Watch out! Here's one coming at us now!"

The four men held their breath and watched in stupefied amazement as one of the glowing forms ascended slowly past them on their vessel's starboard side. It was, as the Time Traveller had noted, a perfectly realized geometric solid, possibly a dodecahedron, that was easily some fifty times as big as was their craft itself. It was illuminated softly from within by a pale yellow radiance that washed across the faces of the quartet in a xanthin and unearthly glaze as they hung, hushed and gaping, from the Time-ship's pipes and bars. The Traveller whistled softly, underneath his breath.

"A chrono-crystal. A fourth-dimensional mathematic growth within the five-dimensional fluid underlying all existence. I'd always theorized that such things should be possible, but to have my hypothesis proved so spectacularly right..."

He trailed off as two more of the immense incandescent shapes, one blue and one a luscious mauve, floated up past them with an eerie, massive grace. With all other eyes fixed upon the glowing geometric marvels as they drifted by, only the fidgeting and nervous Randolph Carter, glancing down, raised the alarm.

"Dear God! One of those things is coming right underneath us!

The timid scholar's fears were validated, catastrophically, almost as soon as they voiced. With a bone jarring crash and a great splintering squeal of brass on glass, their craft impacted with the topmost surface of a lucid and colossal jewel, a tesseract of watery, radiant amethyst that Quatermain reckoned to be almost a furlong in diameter as he picked himself up unsteadily from the smooth, hard plain of mollusk-purple silicate where he'd been flung by the collision of their craft with this giant meta-object. Climbing to his feet, he felt a crystal surface singing faintly there beneath his palms and knew that this was matter of a higher order than that which he was accustomed to.

Not far away both Randolph Carter and his uncle similarly hauled themselves erect, while nearby the Time Traveller, seemingly not much wore for wear, was extracting himself from the dented pipework of his fabulous invention. Allan noticed a thin trail of blood crawl slowly from the Traveller's hairline, where it seemed his head had been brought into contact with the ship's controls, but the explorer did not think the injury looked serious. indeed, the temporal astronaut danced back and forth with great enthusiasm on the surface of the Brobdingnagian gem where they were beached, peering into its depths excitedly.

"Look! It's responding to our presence! I see pictures moving in the inner facets down beneath our feet."

The Traveller's voice rang with the pure thrill of discovering. As Quatermain and other two men looked down into the scrying-glass on which they stood, they realized that the Time-voyager was correct. Deep down within the crystal, images were shifting and transforming in a slow kaleidoscope.

Allan's attention was seized by one vignette in particular: a wasted, almost skeletal old man sprawled on a pallet on what seemed to be a beige rug in an opium den, a thin pipe clasped there in his nerveless fingers. Crouching by the man, a striking woman in a long, red scarf seemed to be speaking urgently to the near cadaver. There was a sudden start of purest horror as Quatermain realized that the drugged and wretched creature slumped there in bug-haunted squalor was himself.

"An Aleph." The Time Traveller sighed, almost ecstatically. "Behold, my friends, Time's very fulcrum. Gaze, if you dare, into the diamond eyepiece of infinity!"


	5. A Glint in Fortune's Eye

**Chapter V: The Glint in Fortune's Eye**

The high-stoked blaze of manuscripts and folios within the fireplace of Lady Ragnall's derelicted library lapped with a dozen brazen tongues of light across the lifeless, sweat-gemmed cheek of Allan Quatermain, the once-famed, now supposedly deceased explorer sprawled upon the scuffed and dust-cauled parquet of the library floor. The dowager herself, ensconced within the tumuli of bedding on the face-to-face divans and scrutinizing the unconscious form of the adventurer for any flicker of vitality, was not entirely certain that her friend's demise was still the world-deceiving hoax he had intended it to be. Stretched before her, gaunt and still and almost without breath, the death of Allan Quatermain seemed of a sudden all too credible.

Her Ladyship was not without some personal experience in feigning death so as to thwart the gross intrusions of the living, having staged her own end some years earlier to live since then in blissful undisturbed seclusion as the stately pile of Ragnall Hall fell into luscious ruin about her, tended only by the statuesque obsidian beauty named Marisa who was even now crouching beside her coma stricken guest, dabbing his cheek with dampened rags and murmuring beneath her breath in the strange sing-song chant of her own tongue. The frail aristocrat supposed Marisa to be weaving, in her native language, charms to draw Quatermain's absent or abducted spirit back from such strange and dangerous realms as those to which his latest dalliance with the drug aduki had transported him.

Marisa, stooping with the radiance of flaming rhetoric and poesy from the hearth-fire casting smears of shuddering light across the sumptuous charcoal-crayon vellum of her skin, was the sole source of the peculiar narcotic which transcended time, the same drug to which Lady Ragnall and now, it would seem, her Ladyship's explorer friend were showing symptoms of addiction. Quatermain, reported dead in some unreachably remote, half-fabled region of the globe had made his way instead to Ragnall Hall where, despite the alleged death of the hall's inhabitant, he still maintained some desperate hope of finding a last trace, a residue of that which he desired: taduki, the mysterious substance by which men and women might escape the confines of their lives, their times and their identities, as Allan had himself experienced upon diverse occasions in the past. Finding Lady Ragnall quite alive and in no short supply of the required plant-extract the adventurer had, perhaps, indulged too deeply and too readily. Now he stretched, rigid and near death, there on the floor beside Marisa while she mopped his brow and whispered queer and foreign incantations over his apparent corpse.

She wondered where he was, to which domain of the great spirit-country he had been displaced. Wiping his grizzled chin, where foam had dried, she noticed a fain twitching, almost imperceptible, there at the corners of his eyes, as if some dream-moth struggled in the cobweb of his sleep. When those crusted lids flickered and opened, but an instant later, the dark beauty ceased her sussurus of chants, her own eyes flooding with relief, with gratitude that the immortal spirits had returned her friend to them.

And then with fear.

The time jewel drifted in the backwash of the hurtling present, hung suspended, floating and becalmed there at the frayed surf hem of Time's unbounded swell. The massive violet crystal, in its mute and enigmatic grandeur, rose up slowly, like a bubble in some treacle-thick and viscous medium, some endless spill of glittering amber with its scintillant and fluid reaches yawning to all sides of the ascending bauble. Perched upon the temporal gem's topside like houseflies on one pendant ornament of some vast chandelier were tiny specks, blackened to silhouette against the amethystine glow of their surround. The specks were four men and the cracked remains of the now-foundered engine that had brought them here, all lodged atop this faceted and purple stone and, so to speak, marooned.

Kneeling upon the cold, hard smoothness of an upper face of the enormous chiseled bead, Quatermain stared down incredulously at the scenes and shapes that flowed and shifted, seemingly below the surface of the luminous, translucent plain beneath him. Visions of his past, of moments crystallized within the time-gem's substance, merged with visions of what seemed to be his future, vivid and outlandish episodes such as the old adventurer had not previously witnessed in his mortal span thus far, nor even even suffered to imagine.

Stark vignettes of incidents that he recalled from travels with his late, lamented friend Sir Henry Curtis blended seamlessly with horrifying glimpses of a life as yet unknown. He saw himself, an opium addicted skeleton dragged from a heathen drug den by a small but strikingly attractive Englishwoman, the prim, cherry-stained rosebud of her lips pursed in a disapproval that seemed constant. He saw himself fighting for his life, aboard some great and frightful skyboat above a dark, benighted city; struggling in the wind-lashed rigging with a large, impossibly-constructed gun that seemed to fire harpoon after harpoon. The woman from the earlier fragment clung against his side, her body pressing to him in the howling night.

The vision shifted. Now he watched a hideous subhuman beast that was absurdly garbed in the remains of what seemed to be formal evening dress, the creature bellowing and laughing hideously as it attacked some great metallic thing that Quatermain could not make visual sense of. More shapes moved against a fire-lit skyline, glinting metal hulks supported on what seemed the spindly legs of monstrous iron flamingos. The explorer had no sooner grasped that he was witnessing some dire, apocalyptic future war when the picture changed.

Now he saw the familiar small, determined woman clad in nothing but a dirty blanket, shrieking, overcome by horror in what looked to Allan's travelled eye like the interior of a dark and rural building, possibly in the Americas. Arcane symbols were inscribed in noxious, nameless fluids on the bare boards of the floor and on the walls, and there was something thrashing over in a distant corner of the room. Quatermain saw himself, screaming as loudly as the woman while engaged in combat as loudly as the woman while engaged in combat with a tentacled and writhing shape that seemed to reach in some way through the walls of the dilapidated farm-house. To his great surprise, another man seemed to be aiding him in his horrendous conflict, whose demeanor Quatermain believed he recognized.

He glanced up from the fascinating and hypnotic vistas swirling on the surface of the gem and looked towards another of the stranded figures trapped there with him on the time-jewel's upper face, the young New England visionary Randolph Carter. Looking back at the horrific incident depicted in the gem, Quatermain shook his head in disbelief. The man assisting him against the squirming nightmare in the farmhouse was identical to the pale youth that crouched not far from the explorer, staring down into the crystal depths beneath him and absorbed in his own visions, with his with his long, underlit face transfixed by terror that was luminous. Could it be Quatermain and Carter would meet at some future point in the material world; fighting alongside one another in some as yet unforeseen, unfathomable combat? Was this drifting diamond atoll truly showing things that were, as yet, to come? were the strange, flickering images that swam in its depths the genuine, predictive sparks that danced across the glittering eye of fate, of fortune and of destiny?

Randolph Carter, lost within his own cascade of vision, groaned with recognition and with longing as there in the jewel before him he saw the familiar vista of his native Arkham, with its gambrel rooftops gilded by the last, long rays of afternoon. To think that, in his mortal form, he slumbered even now in that beloved place, with nothing save his misdirected spirit-self to keep him here upon this glittering plateau of lost souls, where ghostly images of horrors gone or horrors yet to come slithered across the violet surface that he stood upon. Why couldn't he begone from here, and wake in his New England bed? If only he were stronger-willed, a fearless fellow like his Uncle John.

The elder Carter crouched nearby and gazed in wonderment at scenes of strange red deserts, almost-naked ruby-clad princesses and green, towering men that had too many arms, all flowing through the hard-glazed ground beneath him. Hearing Randolph's groan he glanced up in annoyance at his spineless nephew, only to recoil with some surprise at the alarming realization that the lad was starting to become transparent, as if fading gradually from sight. Why, staring through the young man's stooping body, Captain Carter could quite clearly see the fourth unwilling member of their entourage, the man who'd brought them here and called himself a traveller in time, who tinkered with the damaged framework of his aeon-leaping craft, away on Randolph Carter's further side. The steely-eyed Confederate officer swore softly underneath his breath and called out to his fellows.

"Look there! My young nephew's disappearing from plain sight!"

Quatermain and the tinkering, distracted chrononaut looked up from their diversions to watch in astonishment as the moonstruck and pale New Englander winked finally from view, leaving but three of them there on the priceless, drifting boulder. The Time Traveller seemed mortified, as if the younger Carter's disappearance should have been foreseen.

"I might have known. Since you three are not physically immersed in this dimension as are my machine and I, then when you wake up from your curious dreams, or astral wanderings, or drugged stupors, you will vanish from this place. It's only I myself who must remain here till my engine is repaired.

The grim Confederate officer absorbed this information, glancing wistfully to where the visions of a life to come still trickled ceaselessly beneath the purpled ice. A dark eyed woman rode, bare breasted, on a great eight legged reptile underneath two moons. Somewhere inside him, he made up his mind.

"Look at him! Now the other Carter's going, too!"

Quatermain grabbed the traveller's sleeve and pointed to the tall cavalry off officer as he became more wraith-like and was, of a sudden, gone from view. The traveller shook his head.

"I wanted to alert you to the threat our cosmos faces from the Universe beyond, where nether-horrors squirm and howl. How you'll be gone before I can tell you a fraction of the things you'll need to know to aid you when you at last face the adversary."

Quatermain hardly listened, looking back instead to the relentless diorama that unravelled in the violet watch-glass 'neath his heels. The visions there seemed more familiar than they had previously. He saw himself arriving at the ruins of Ragnall Hall, met by the grave Marisa with her candelabra. In another facet of the gem he watched himself inhale the drug then fall into a faint, tended to in his slumber by the servant girl. In still a further surface of the jewel he saw...

"No! God, what monstrosity is this?"

The veteran explorer reeled back from the awful drama that unwound within the crystal here below him. He was filled with the unshakeable conviction that he must return to Lady Ragnall's library and his and his unconscious form. This thought was barely formed before he too began to wax translucent, melting like a fogs at dawn from the time Traveller's disappointed gaze.

The temporal argonaut walked over over to the spot upon the surface of the giant precious stone from which his last companion, Quatermain, had lately disappeared. The traveller wondered what had caused that sudden terrified expression in the instants before the adventurer was gone from this reality. He looked down past the gleaming toecaps of his shoes, into the crystal depths. The image seemed to be of a dilapidated library. Two women, one a Moorish beauty and the other one a wasted crone, were cowering against a wall there at the room of book's far side. Lurching towards them, ghastly in the firelight as it crawled, inverted, like a monstrous crab across the chamber's floor, its lips drawn back to croak strange and unnerving alien syllables was...

The Time Traveller took an involuntary step back from the ghastly image, swallowing hard. This could not be occurring. Why, the elderly explorer had not been gone from his body for more than a moment in the natural world! How could their enemies have struck so quickly? He steeled himself and looked, once more, into the glass. The hideously contorted body that advanced across the library floor towards the women was clearly the mortal shell of Allan Quatermain. But the grotesque alien intelligence that glared out from the burning, hate-filled eyes...

That wasn't Allan Quatermain at all.


	6. The Awakening

**Chapter VI: The Awakening**  
It had nothing save the dimmest semblance of a self, of an identity. At rest and in its natural state it was one single facet of what might be termed a self aware idea, a living compound symbol that existed only in the deepest fathoms of the human mind, or in the strange, unbounded immaterial oceans that those depths afforded access to. Those few explorers, be they lunatic or warlock or philosopher, who'd sought to sound these eerie, insubstantial territories and to catalogue the entities they found there, had identified the over-arcing idea-colony and had given it a name. They called it Yuggoth. They perceived it, variously, as a planet, as a god, or as a state of mind.

The myriad lesser notions which comprised this hive-like meta-being were in turn see as subsidiary deities, who functioned both as avatars and envoys to the central, hideously animate conceptual core. These individual agents were collectively termed Lloigor, with a separate name ascribed to each, a different range of attributes. to each was allocated its own species of subservient elementals, subjugated to its alien will.

The creature that was currently enjoying the sensations of material form there in the fire-lit library of half ruined Ragnall Hall was then, in a sense, not one but rather several overlapping gels of consciousness, of self. Somewhere within it. It was Yuggoth, the mother-complex of insidious alien ideas that drifted in the dark backwaters of the human mind and soul. Upon a lower, more immediate level it was the Lloigor named Ithaqqa, worshipped in the arctic regions as a demon of the upper air, or of the intellectual faculty in man. Most intimately, in as much as one might say that it was capable of understanding anything, it understood itself to be a nameless elemental of the kind known as wind-walkers, or sometimes as Wendigo.

In its customary habitat, which was a timeless, blissful vortex of deep, curdled indigo, its shape and form were like the astral counterpart of some repulsive gorgeous hybrid between the crustacean and coelenterate. From its lightheaded upper canopy of jellyfish-frilled skirts depended long and trailing many-jointed legs, cased in an iridescent chitin. While at least, the thing existed in an infinite continuum of perfect and delirious pleasure, but at this current place and moment in the fields of space-time, it was not by any means at rest. It was at work, and active in the solid, awkward world of flesh and matter.

The body it inhabited had an unpleasant warmth; a soft, five pointed star of rind and pulp enclosing a strange, spider-like machinery of brittle bone. An awful heaviness weighed everywhere about it in its new surroundings, and it first failed to comprehend how such a delicate, unwieldy organism might be made to move at all. While tugging randomly at nerves and muscles in the leaden darkness that surrounded it, it chanced to raise what seemed to be twin shutter-mechanisms covering the host-creature's optic sensors. Light and form and color flooded in, a stunning and incomprehensible deluge.

It seemed to be within an enclosed cube of perfectly transparent gas constrained by flat plane surfaces of solid and material substance, overhead, below, and to all sides. Within this area were other forms, apparently inanimate, and two separate shapes, five pointed in the manner of the elemental creature's current host, that moved, and from which hateful, high pitched noises issued. Lifting itself up as best it could upon the bone struts radiating from its central body-mass, the Wendigo began to crawl across the cold, hard surface hard surface beneath it, as it made its way towards the chamber's other living beings, to investigate. To see what they were made of.

Allan Quatermain was falling, in a hemmed glissade of sheer and whirling brilliance, tumbling from the weird ethers latitudes in which he had so lately travelled, back towards the mortal plane where his corporeal form, vacated of its spirit, sprawled insensate on the parquet floor of Lady Ragnall's crumbling library.

In his discorporate wanderings, the explorer had seemed to encounter other displaced souls, encamping with them, ultimately, on the upper surface of a massive and bewildering time-gem in whose depths disturbing glimpses of present and future were made visible. Just such a glimpse, of the horrific circumstances currently back there in the mortal world at Ragnall Hall, had spurred the numinous adventurer to take flight back to the material realm and his abandoned flesh, before it was too late.

Below him now, if there was any such thing as below in the directionless cascade of which he was a part, Quatermain saw an image, small at first, of the familiar, book-lined, hearth-lit room where he had quaffed the bitter and transporting fumes of the exotic drug aduki, it seemed an eternity ago. By concentrating on this scene of relative stability within the furious metaphysic flow about him, Allan found that he was able to propel himself towards it, so that it appeared to swell about him, opening to enfold him in the mundane petals of that human room, that human moment.

The frenetic, howling tumult of the psychic flow about him ceased. Quatermain floated, an invisible and disembodied wraith, at a point just below the reassuringly firm looking and familiar ceiling of the library. Turning his attentions to the drama stage, the famous hunter's most phantasmagoric apprehensions were in one stark instant realized.

Crawling through the leaping, page-strewn shadows of the library floor, arched over backwards like a monstrous quadrupedal crab, its head and face inverted so that the familiar features found a new and alien context with the rolling eyes below the grimacing, contorting gash that was its mouth, the recklessly abandoned mortal shell of Allan Quatermain had clearly become host to a new and most decidedly unwelcome tenant.

Sat bolt upright on her makeshift bed there at the chamber's centre Allan saw the frail and bird-like Lady Ragnall screaming, shrill with panic, as the horribly contorted and possessed form of the great explorer moved with an unsettling and arachnid-like deliberation towards the dowager and her imposing maidservant, the statuesque Marisa. This proud beauty of the Africas stood fast between her mistress and the nightmare which advanced upon them both through the deceptive, flickering fire-glow, her hands moving in what Quatermain assumed to be magical gestures, these accompanied by rapid streams of incantation from the woman's full, dark lips. She seemed to be attempting to repel the hostile and invasive spirit that had taken residence within the skin of the adventurer, resorting in extremity to ancient charms and rituals of banishment drawn from the long traditions of her people, who had known the drug aduki since time immemorial.

The spells and imprecations seemed to have no visible effect upon the progress of his stolen body as it lurched and creaked across the floor towards the frightened women. Quatermain feared that whatever strange intelligence was currently residing in his borrowed flesh was one from far outside the witch-woman's experience, or, indeed, her wildest dreams. He feared, further to this, that he himself knew with precision what had commandeered his empty shell.

During his sojourn outside the perimeters of ordinary reality, he had encountered a most enigmatic individual known only as "The Time Traveler." This personage had sought to alert Allan and the astral crew that Quatermain had by then fallen in with to the dangers of a monstrous, alien threat from outside our familiar Universe. It seemed now, to the bodiless and hovering adventurer, as if these otherworldly forces had enjoined in a precautionary attack upon such mortals as might serve to hinder the infernal and unfathomable design.

The crawling travesty had by now reached the desperately incanting servant woman. One of its hands, contorted to a crab-like claw, lashed out to fasten viciously upon the ankle of the ebon beauty, fingernails pressed hard into her skin and drawing blood. It's eyes glared, made with hatred, in that almost unfamiliar and inverted face. It snapped its teeth together with a dreadful clacking sound that left the floating, disembodied Quatermain with no illusion as to its intentions. If he did not wish to witness his own body as it murdered and attempted to devour two helpless women, then he must act quickly. Working solely from his instincts, as he'd done through his entire career, he mustered such resources as there were in his ethereal form and dived towards his capering and stolen flesh.

To be immersed in mortal form again, the hot breath again, the hot breath whistling his lungs, was as profound a shock as to plunge suddenly into an icy pool. More shocking still was the appalling, hideous sensation of a body shared, the sense that he was completely alone inside his skin. No sooner had his astral self re-entered the familiar contours of his earthly frame than Allan felt himself attacked by something that was with him in that previously inviolate and personal darkness. A brief impression came to him of mollusk-sticky ruffs and rills, of clattering, many jointed legs that scrabbled frantically for purchase on his psychic essence, yet he found that he could not construct a picture of exactly what he wrestled with. It was, perhaps, the very pinnacle of fear, as if one were tied fast inside a lightless sack with some unknown and vicious jungle beast for company. He screamed, and there in his interior blackness, something screamed beside him.

As suddenly convulsing body of their guest released its painful hold upon her ankle, bloodied fingers clawing at the air, Marisa gasped and took a step back. She gazed down with uncomprehending horror at the old man's body as it thrashed and writhed and twisted at her feet. Quatermain seemed to scratch and slap at his own face, as in a paroxysm of self-disgust. Foam-spattered lips worked, upside down, upon that crazed, contorted face, and yet it seemed as if not one but two unearthly, anguished howls were issued from within.

Remembering her mistress suddenly, Marisa glanced behind her at the shape slumped in the hollow of the face-to-face divans. The thin, emaciated hand was raised across the sunken great, that neither rose nor fell, to clutch the fabric of the dowager's robe into a crumbled rose above the heart. The eyes stared, empty, into flame-licked emptiness and with a cold, dull pang Marisa understood that Lady Ragnall was no more among the living. Though the dowager had, through the long years of Marisa's service, grown to be more of a companion than employer, the dark beauty could spare no more than an instant in regret for Lady Ragnall's passing. There were more immediate matters that must be attended to, if she and Quatermain were not to follow her late mistress to the land of shades. Steeling herself, she returned her attention to the thrashing and possessed form at her feet.

Quatermain's features and the agonized expression stretched across them seemed to flow and flicker in the hearth-light, so that for an instant it would be the face of the explorer Marisa saw, with human pain and panic shining from his eyes, only to be replaced in the next moment by a grimacing, contorting travesty, in whose gaze only murder and appalling knowledge burned. Marisa thought that, at the last, she understood what had occurred.

Conditions such as this had been described by her own tribesmen in relation to taduki-usage, part of their accumulated lore about the subject, but Marisa noted, only in the very oldest and most sinister of their traditions did they speak of monstrous possessions such as Quatermain seemed to be presently in thrall to. When they spoke of such they would refer to the phenomenon by a variety of names, and all these names, Marisa understood, spoke only of one thing:Great Old Ones. Fruit of Yuggoth. Lloigor. Creatures from beyond the rational boundaries of Being, hoverers upon the edge of space and time that sought for nothing save an entry to the human world, that they might claim it as their own. These many names were never mentioned by Marisa's people without a reflexive movement of the hand, the sketching of a talismanic symbol in the air to ward away malignant influence. Wild-eyed, the tall obsidian beauty looked about her for a scrap of paper and some writing tools with which she might construct this "Elder Sign" herself and in this manner aid the man who writhed and twisted like a landed fish upon the library floor before her.

She ripped out the empty flyleaf from a book of Swinburne's poetry that was nearby, and plucking up a letter knife, attempted to draw blood from her own hand with which she might inscribe the necessary prophylactic hieroglyph. As she did so, Quatermain rolled over in his paroxysm, shuddering and roaring in his hideous battle with himself. One of his flailing legs thrashed out and, in its passing, knocked one of the larger blazing books from its position in the hearth, onto the parquet floor. The spiteful tongues of flame licked up towards the dry and brittle pages of the other tomes that lined the chamber's walls. Marisa cursed, and knew that she had even less time to accomplish that which needed to be done. The paper-knife moved once, decisively, across her palm, and as the blood welled up, Marisa dipped her finger in it, as a stylus, and began to scrawl her scarlet ritual marks upon the torn page.

Quatermain was in Hell. He knew, with a despairing certainty, that his was not the stronger of the warring personalities that skirmished in his flesh. The drive and fury of the ectoplasmic foe's attack had the implacable, unreasoning intensity of a typhoon or hurricane. Another moment, Allan knew, would see his very soul torn up and shredded, made to so much spiritual confetti by the dozen clawing, scrabbling arms of his attacker. As the utter essence of him was dragged bloodied to the howling threshold of annihilation, Quatermain was all but unaware that there about him, Lady Ragnall's library had begun to burn as if in an approximation of the purgatory in which he knew himself to be.

Afraid to get too close to the explorer's whirling arms lest she be blinded, stunned, or made by other means incapable, Marisa hoped that she had drawn her hasty talisman correctly. Carmine lines described a seven-pointed star, with, at its centre, the hooked sun-wheel sacred to the Vedic faiths. Summoning all her courage, she lunged forward, shouting ancient names of power as she pressed the ensanguined scrap to the explorer's perspiration beaded brow.

Quatermain screamed, the blackness about him all of a sudden pierced by a strange, esoteric mark, limned in red fire, whose radiance was blasting, devastating, terrible. He screamed, but that which was beside him in the blackness screamed much louder, with an urgency that sounded almost mortal. Boiling up out of his mind, his body, the possessing creature was, for a bare instant visible to human sight. Marisa gasped and took a step back, marveling at the shimmering display of bilious light that hung above the still-convulsing form of the adventurer. It was a thing of undulating veils, grotesquely mobile and articulated pincers, wavering in centipede-like unison. The sparks of brightness next became an after-image of themselves, a rash of colored blotches spreading on the retina, and then were gone.

Marisa helped the dazed and mumbling explorer to his feet, then did her best to steer the pair of them out from the blazing library to the chill terraces and laws beyond the confines of the fire-doomed mansion. Quatermain sprawled, resting with his back against a dark and hulking tree-stump in the manor grounds, the leaping flame-light of the burning building dancing in his glazed and staring eyes. Tearing a strip for he along gown to quell the bleeding from her palm, the servant girl considered, at some length, what she should do about the clearly traumatized adventurer.

He was quite evidently, cursed. Amongst Marisa's tribe it was well known that those who earned the enmity of the Great Old Ones from outside time and space would, in all likelihood, be plagued continually by these deathless and malicious entities for the remainder of their lives. To be in close proximity to persons so afflicted was to risk calling the dire attentions of the Old Ones down upon one's self. Marisa's safest course of action was, unfortunately, all too plain. Staring, mesmerized and horror stricken, a the conflagration that devoured both Lady Ragnall's homestead and, somewhere inside, the dowager herself, Quatermain did not notice as Marisa took he leave. He was not destined to encounter her again, nor would he ever more experience the drug which she alone had access to, that terrible and captivating render of reality known in the world's most occult, twilight corners as taduki.

Of course, all this was years ago.

Quatermain barely now remembered that appalling night, or the disorienting morning after when he found himself, ill and amnesiac, stumbling through the grounds surrounding the burned-out remains of Lady Ragnall's manor. The black, enigmatic servant woman and her cache of the drug that Quatermain now hungered for were nowhere to be found.

Allan had drifted, as a tramp, to London, and from there had worked his passage to the Middle East, where opium was plentiful and would to some degree assuage the pain of separation from the old adventurer's preferred narcotic, the sublime taduki. Now he floated in a carefree amniotic darkness, possibly in some side street of Cairo, though in truth, he cared not where he was. The only flaw in the explorer's artificial paradise was the persistent female voice that seemed to penetrate his reverie, demanding his attention, begging him to wake. Reluctantly, he let his eyes creak open.

She was beautiful. And yet the pursed, prim rosebud mouth, the carefully bound-up black hair all kindled in the world weary explorer's breast a pang of faint alarm, of recognition. He had seen this face before, and if so, where? In the insensible, drug fuddled depths of Allan's mind sounded a chime of deep unease, a chill and shive bringing wind blown through the veil, the curtains that surround our narrow, mortal premises. He did not know this woman, did not want t face the fraught, precarious future that he sensed she represented.

"Go away." he slurred, then one more closed his eyes.

But she did not go away.

And everything occurred, according to its course.

THE END


End file.
